All hail the golden age of television, in which complex series like The Sopranos and The Wire have been crowned (by some) as the new novels, and the proliferation of DVRs and instant streaming services means we can watch whatever we want, whenever we want. TV is enjoying an unprecedented intellectual moment – even our presidents, prime ministers and monarchs can’t help but admit they tune in.

Naming your favorite TV shows is a deeply personal revelation, an act that can be both politically and culturally charged – even if you’re not naming them on a global stage. So here’s how more than a dozen world leaders have answered that question. Which would you rather share a sofa and a bag of popcorn with?

Barack and Michelle Obama

Think of a prestige TV series … any prestige TV series. Odds are that, at one time or another, Barack Obama has said he watches it. The list includes Homeland, Boardwalk Empire, House of Cards, Breaking Bad, Downton Abbey, Mad Men and The Wire, his very favorite show. At a state dinner in February, Obama approached HBO's chief executive to request advance episodes of Game of Thrones and True Detective. (To be fair, he's also really into SportsCenter.)

Arch-conservative radio host Rush Limbaugh has even accused the president of watching too much TV. I suspect that like more of us than would care to admit, the leader of the free world doesn’t actually have time to watch all the quality programming with which he professes to keep up. But wouldn’t that only make him more relatable to the premium cable-subscribing, recap-skimming members of his support base?

The royal family

For Her Majesty, it's an entirely different ballgame. For one thing, she’s an 88-year-old great-grandmother, and for another, she doesn't have an election coming up. According to the Radio Times, the Queen loves EastEnders, Coronation Street, Keeping Up Appearances, Last of the Summer Wine and Doctor Who (rumour holds that her favorite Doctor is Christopher Eccleston). It is also said that the Queen had a soft spot for Telly Savalas’ Kojak.

In late June, she and the Duke of Edinburgh toured the Belfast studio where much of Game of Thrones is filmed. The Queen’s staff politely neglected to mention whether she actually watches the wildly popular (and wildly graphic) HBO series, which, frankly, is ample evidence that she doesn't – almost as ample as the fact that she declined to sit on the Iron Throne. (As for the Queen’s Guard, that’s a different story.) The very next day, she and Philip visited the set of the BBC’s Antiques Roadshow, favorite of grandparents worldwide, at Hillsborough Castle. This time, QEII didn’t bother to conceal her affection for the program, asking host Fiona Bruce when the episode featuring herself and her husband will air.

In general, the royals seem less concerned about whether their TV programs are highbrow, and more that they are homegrown. The Duchess of Cornwall’s favorite program is Strictly Come Dancing, while the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge are apparently fans of The X Factor and Downton Abbey.

David Cameron

Cameron loves murder mysteries like The Killing, Case Histories, Injustice, Midsomer Murders, Silent Witness and Elementary. In fact, he loves them so much that before the joint committee on the national security strategy, in January, he claimed that detective TV shows justify the "snooper’s charter”, legislation that would create a database monitoring online activity.

"I love watching, as I should probably stop telling people, crime dramas on the television,” he said. “There is hardly a crime drama where a crime is solved without using the data of a mobile communications device.”

As far as Cameron’s opponents in the 2010 general election go, Labour's Gordon Brown prefers Simon Cowell-style reality TV like The X Factor and Britain's Got Talent, while the Liberal Democrats'Nick Clegg watches Come Dine With Me. For what it’s worth, current Labour leader Ed Miliband’s favorite show is The West Wing, which his staffers took to quoting in strategy meetings.

Tony Abbott

The Australian prime minister also named Downton Abbey as his favorite show, and the “Dowager Duchess” – by which he meant the Dowager Countess, Maggie Smith – as his favourite character. Aristocratic costume dramas are polling well in Commonwealth realms.

Stephen Harper

Harper loves Murdoch Mysteries so much he finagled his way on to the set. Photo: Adrian Wyld/AP

In 2011, the Canadian prime minister made a cameo appearance in Murdoch Mysteries, one of the highest-rated shows on Canadian TV. Harper – who calls the turn-of-the-century detective series his “favourite program, of what’s on these days” – plays a police constable who doesn’t recognise the prime minister. (Get it?)

“It’s a little bit of irony there,” Harper explains, without a hint of irony himself. Justin Trudeau, leader of Canada’s Liberal party and one of Harper’s chief rivals, prefers Downton Abbey.

The Dalai Lama

Tibet’s spiritual leader has said he likes the Discovery Channel, though we suspect His Holiness – purity incarnate – is more a fan of the network’s traditional documentary programming than American Chopper or Deadliest Catch.

George W Bush

One of President Bush’s most famous in-office gaffes saw him choke on a pretzel and pass out while watching an NFL game on TV in 2002. Perhaps that memorable incident – and Dubya’s general reputation as something less than the smartest guy around the conference table – is part of the reason Bush generally downplays his TV-watching habits.

That said, during his 2004 campaign, Bush owned up to watching A&E’s Biography and – unsurprisingly, as a former owner of the Texas Rangers – baseball.

As for the appetites of other commanders in chief, FDR favored Mickey Mouse cartoons and former actor Ronald Reagan enjoyed Family Ties so much he offered to appear on the show. They didn’t take him up on it.

Hillary and Bill Clinton

Bill and Hillary watch House of Cards and Scandal … should this concern us? Photograph: Lucas Jackson/Reuters

Interestingly, the comments the former (and future?) first couple have made about watching TV deal mainly with watching together, emphasizing the intactness of their marriage – a PR battle the Clintons have been fighting on multiple fronts for decades.

“We both love Grey's Anatomy and did our best to watch it together whenever we could before the campaign began,” Bill told Time in 2007, before his wife's first tilt at the presidency. Last month, Hillary described how they "totally binge-watched” House of Cards together.

While Bill is a known fan of 24 and Scandal, Madam Secretary has spoken of her love for home-improvement shows. She particularly likes Love It or List It, in which families must choose between keeping their freshly renovated home or buying a new place. New York Times columnist Gail Collins characterizes the show’s appeal as “Clintonesque” – each episode’s various crises are overcome with “hard work”, then, voilà, “happy ending”.

Pope Benedict XVI

The former pope is a big fan of reality TV … and by reality, we just mean the evening news. Source: AP

According to Archbishop Georg Gänswein, Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI watched the evening news on a flat-screen television in the luxuriously appointed papal apartment. He reportedly spent the first hours of his retirement enjoying the TV coverage of his departure from the Vatican.

Pope Francis has elected to live elsewhere, in a relatively austere hotel suite at the Vatican’s Casa Santa Marta residence – it’s unclear what the TV situation is over there, but my gut is that, if there is one, it’s far from state of the art.

Joe Biden

America's wacky uncle has expressed his fondness for Parks and Recreation – on which he guest-starred as himself – and Modern Family, but he's also admitted to watching "snippets" of the exuberantly trashy Toddlers & Tiaras spinoff Here Comes Honey Boo Boo on Air Force Two. (Sure, Joe. "Snippets.") This isn’t entirely out of character, if only because Biden’s gregarious, freewheeling persona is the closest thing the White House has to a reality TV star.

Modern Family comes up frequently when American politicians talk TV. The ABC sitcom has been cited as a favorite by not only Biden and the Obamas, but also by the 2012 Republican presidential nominee, Mitt Romney, and his wife Ann. Why? It’s a perfect centrist cipher. The series is both consistently highly rated and critically acclaimed – it has racked up 18 Primetime Emmy Awards since its 2009 debut. Modern Family features multiethnic families and a gay couple, yet has largely avoided controversy (among even the Romney-est viewers) by reinforcing wholesome moral values and family togetherness at every turn.

Antonin Scalia

Though the famously conservative supreme court justice “[doesn’t] even know what Homeland is”, the court’s longest-serving justice told New York magazine that he loves Seinfeld – which may be surprising, given that the show’s ensemble of disaffected Manhattan liberals don’t exactly hold traditional family values in reverence. Then again, Scalia grew up in New York City and the Soup Nazi apparently transcends party lines.

“In fact, I got some CDs of Seinfeld,” he said. “Oh, boy. The Nazi soup kitchen? No soup for you!”

It just goes to show you: public figures’ tastes in television, be they calculated to maximize popular appeal or to express genuine preferences, are not always what you would expect. There’s no one way to watch TV like a world leader – but setting your DVR to record Modern Family and Downton Abbey couldn’t hurt.